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Download snapshots?


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I’m finding that Airtable does so many things right, and I want to use it in my nonprofit for client/case/volunteer management, but I’m hesitant to throw all of our eggs in that basket without the ability to locally back up the data—at least once in awhile—including attachments. It would be very valuable to us to be able to download the snapshots, and then restore from them later, if needed. (Note: I’m assuming that snapshots include attachments…that would be key)

23 replies

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We’re working on improved export/snapshot functionality: You will be able to export a .zip containing (1) CSVs with data for all tables in your base, and (2) each attachment uploaded to your base.

In the meantime, you can jump through a few hoops to achieve the same thing by exporting each view to CSV, and then programmatically (or manually) downloading each attachment referenced in the CSV.

Thank you for the feedback!


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  • Participating Frequently
  • 5 replies
  • April 12, 2016
Emmett_Nicholas wrote:

We’re working on improved export/snapshot functionality: You will be able to export a .zip containing (1) CSVs with data for all tables in your base, and (2) each attachment uploaded to your base.

In the meantime, you can jump through a few hoops to achieve the same thing by exporting each view to CSV, and then programmatically (or manually) downloading each attachment referenced in the CSV.

Thank you for the feedback!


Is there an update on when this will be available?


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  • Known Participant
  • 92 replies
  • April 19, 2016

This addresses my exact concern. I can’t go all in unless I promise my company a way out


  • Participating Frequently
  • 61 replies
  • April 19, 2016
Hashim_Warren wrote:

This addresses my exact concern. I can’t go all in unless I promise my company a way out


The feature still isn’t available, but out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why the CSV export approach doesn’t work?


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  • Known Participant
  • 92 replies
  • April 19, 2016
Howie wrote:

The feature still isn’t available, but out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why the CSV export approach doesn’t work?


Howie, it’s just a chore. And the more difficult it is, the less we’ll do it.


Can this be done view the API or in some automated fashion?


Howie wrote:

The feature still isn’t available, but out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why the CSV export approach doesn’t work?


Part of the chore that we see has to do with maintaining the data types. If a new table is created from a CSV, all columns are imported as type Single line text. If you want to maintain all the work you did setting up formulas and display formats and a host of other data type issues, you need to do a copy/paste of all the data that you’ve stashed away in an export.


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  • 15 replies
  • May 24, 2016
Emmett_Nicholas wrote:

We’re working on improved export/snapshot functionality: You will be able to export a .zip containing (1) CSVs with data for all tables in your base, and (2) each attachment uploaded to your base.

In the meantime, you can jump through a few hoops to achieve the same thing by exporting each view to CSV, and then programmatically (or manually) downloading each attachment referenced in the CSV.

Thank you for the feedback!


The .zip file with CSV and attachments would mostly satisfy my needs.


  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • June 17, 2016

Upvote for this. Agree with Chris regarding dl of .zip files. I’m using a table to track expenses. Would be awesome for somebody with access to be able to dl all receipts at once. I realize I can compress the source folder and email it to collaborators/viewers separately, but the more done in the app the better…


  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • November 16, 2016

Any further news on the development of this feature? I have a need to export a view with attachments, and it would be a lot of work to download each attachment after a CVS export. I’m not aware of another way to automate that process in Airtable. Is there?


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  • 6 replies
  • November 18, 2016

Glad to see I’m not alone. Using air table for all my work but concerned the only backup source is with air table. The more I use it the more concerned I am that I have no other backup. Feel that this issue is being put on the long finger and after reading this I realise I’m not alone.


Hi, any updates for having the attachments being downloaded with the csv file?
I have figured out some solution for automatic download of the urls of my attachments which is provided in the csv file. But still curious to see if a master solution would be on the way…


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  • Known Participant
  • 11 replies
  • March 2, 2017

We would be much more excited about moving out client tracking to this service if we knew there was an easy and frequent way to back up the data locally and restore it if necessary.


  • New Participant
  • 2 replies
  • April 10, 2017

Is there any update on this feature? Being able to download data as a backup is a key missing feature that is preventing our company from using Airtable. Bonus points if this was something that could be automated as a downloadable zip.

But until then forget about it. It is too easy to input vast amounts of data into Airtable and then lose it. I’m not going to take that risk. Might as well keep using Excel.

I hope Airtable isn’t deliberately holding this feature back in order to coerce people into upgrading into the paid version that lets you have extended snapshots. If so that would be really stupid. I don’t mind paying for Airtable, just let me have control of my data.


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  • Inspiring
  • 31 replies
  • October 29, 2018

I’ve seen this same thing many times, so I figured we would build a way to get external backups automatically. Check out the show and tell we did for it last week here: How to set up automatic external backups for Airtable in 20 minutes


Is there an update on when this could be available?


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  • Inspiring
  • 368 replies
  • August 13, 2020

We’ve built a tool that lets you auto-export backups regularly to Dropbox.


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  • Inspiring
  • 28 replies
  • December 8, 2020

We released an open-source tool to do this, which allows making automated backups of your Airtable base.

It runs using AWS, and the backups are therefore stored into your own AWS Account so that you keep data ownership.

As a company, that’s what we use, to have our own external backups.


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  • Known Participant
  • 47 replies
  • September 20, 2021
Howie wrote:

The feature still isn’t available, but out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why the CSV export approach doesn’t work?


I’m in need of accessing snapshot data so looking to understand this method a bit better. Can we down a view of the CSV once we’ve gone to a newer version of the base/table. So for example if snapshot 1 was last month, snapshot 2 was at the start of this month. Can I download CSVs for snapshot one without having to take my entire base back to snapshot 1? Because if I do that, then I lose all the values in the current state of my base. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your solution so any clarification would be much appreciated.


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Emmett_Nicholas wrote:

We’re working on improved export/snapshot functionality: You will be able to export a .zip containing (1) CSVs with data for all tables in your base, and (2) each attachment uploaded to your base.

In the meantime, you can jump through a few hoops to achieve the same thing by exporting each view to CSV, and then programmatically (or manually) downloading each attachment referenced in the CSV.

Thank you for the feedback!


@Airtable_Admin1 @Airtable_admin3 Any update on this planned update to export functionality please?


Same here, with so many bases and tables, manually downloading data is not feasible. Any updates on when a better data export will be available?


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Marianne_Hooge1 wrote:

Same here, with so many bases and tables, manually downloading data is not feasible. Any updates on when a better data export will be available?


I use the new Google document generator to achieve this. Creates a Google Doc of my data based on a view via an automation set to run once a week.

Works like a charm!


Willem_Dewulf
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  • Known Participant
  • 19 replies
  • July 22, 2022
Marianne_Hooge1 wrote:

Same here, with so many bases and tables, manually downloading data is not feasible. Any updates on when a better data export will be available?


Hi @Marianne_Hoogeveen , if you want to automate this process then Pro Backup might be a good solution for you. It automatically backs up all of your data once per day and syncs them to dynamic Google Sheets file.

Here’s more info about this: https://probackup.io/backup/airtable


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